


Stand and Deliver

by akaparalian



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: (eventually) - Freeform, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Future Fic, Immortal Alec Lightwood, M/M, Quests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-16 10:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15434787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: All the legends are true. Alec Lightwood pays a visit to the Fountain of Youth.





	1. Odyssey

**Author's Note:**

> Hello hello! I'm so excited to finally be posting this fic. It was one of the first ideas that hit me when I binged the show back in May. It's actually been done for a few weeks now, but with the craziness of Malec Week and my somewhat unexpected productivity, I haven't really felt like there was a good time to post it until now.
> 
> This will be 3 parts -- all of which are finished, I'll just be giving each a quick final proofread before posting -- and I'll be updating weekly for the next two weeks, on Wednesdays. (If you're reading Love in a Major Key, that will still update on Sundays! /casual plug) Just as an FYI, as well, this is mostly Alec-centric for the first two parts; Magnus won't show up until the third act.
> 
> With that, please enjoy -- and feel free to find me on [Tumblr](http://floralegia.tumblr.com) or [Twitter!](http://twitter.com/akaparalian)

The Seelie Queen has always been, unambiguously, one of Alec’s least favorite people in the Downworld. Once upon a time, Magnus broke up with him for her, sort of. They’re not exactly friends. 

But he’s a practical man, and she has something he needs. 

It’s been a long road for him, getting to this point, and as Alec looks up from where he’s kneeling to stare up into the childlike face of one of the most powerful beings in the known world, he knows that it’s only going to get worse from here. 

“Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says lightly, her eyes gleaming. “What a pleasant surprise.”

When she nods at him, he rises from the ground, brushing earth off of his pants. “I apologize for not warning you of my intent to visit, my lady.” 

He hadn’t been able to justify the risk of such a message being intercepted, of word getting out, not when he was all but certain her curiosity would get the best of her if he just showed up anyway. 

“It’s quite all right. I’m sure you wouldn’t be here if it were not important.” 

He doesn’t like her tone, the way her voice curls around the word _important_ , but then that’s nothing new. Alec does his best to level her with a steady stare and keep his breathing and heartbeat even, determined not to show any signs of either the nervousness or the anticipation that are both roiling in his gut.

“It is important,” he acknowledges. “But it’s important only to me. This is a… personal call. I’m not here on behalf of the Institute, or the Clave.”

He does precious little on behalf of the Clave these days, but while he knows the Seelie Queen is probably well aware of that fact, he doesn’t exactly want to say it out loud. Not here.

The Queen leans forward, an amused, cruel curiosity dancing in her eyes. “A personal call, Nephilim?”

“Yes, my lady. I — there is a favor I would like to ask of you.” He curses himself for the brief stumble, but the Queen seems to have hardly noticed, skipping down out of her throne and moving with disturbing grace to stand in front of him, until she has to jut her chin sharply upward to look him in the eyes. When she speaks, her voice is soft, sharp, and twisting.

“And what is it that you have come here to ask of me?”

This, at least, he knows exactly how to answer; he’s been planning this moment for quite some time. His lips twist into an almost predatory smirk. 

“Eternity.”

—

Alec had needed to be incredibly careful in his research. If he’d slipped up, even one time, and left the wrong book lying around, or left his notes where they could be found by anyone other than him, or shown too much interest when asking a faux-casual question, he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone would have figured it out. And by ‘someone,’ what he really means, of course, is Magnus — though Izzy or Jace finding out would have been bad too. But them, he could’ve dealt with; he knows his siblings better than anyone, and while he knows they would have been beyond pissed at first, he also knows they would have gotten over it, come to understand his point of view. That certainty is part of why he feels like he can do this at all. 

The real problem is that in their initial anger, he has no doubt that either one of them would have gone straight to Magnus. And while he loves Magnus more than he ever could have imagined loving anyone, and knows that Magnus feels exactly the same way about him, he also knows that Magnus would never, ever have stood by and allowed him to go through with this. Even though it’s _his_ choice, his burden to bear, his risk to take. 

So Alec had kept very careful watch over all his notes and materials, hidden the books well, feigned disinterest even as he asked probing questions, and overall done his best to not let anyone know that he was actively researching the Fountain of Youth.

—

He’s never seen the Queen more delighted, which is almost enough to make him want to call the whole thing off.

“The ritual consists of three steps,” she explains, voice light and lyrical even as she talks of deep, wild magic, the likes of which Alec has never really seen. Most of the court has left them at her order, leaving just her, Alec, and some of her most trusted advisors, most of whom Alec recognizes by sight, even if he doesn’t know their names. They are walking together in a tight little knot, though Alec has no idea where they’re going and hasn’t found it prudent to ask. “First, of course, you must find the water.”

Alec nods; that part is the same in every single text he could find, even the Mundane ones, though it appears in slightly different forms depending on the source. In some cases, there’s a map or a path to follow, or a guide to help the seeker along their way. In others, it’s more of a stab in the dark, searching blindly through the wilderness for as long as it takes until the Fountain is finally revealed.

As he follows the Seelie Queen down a narrow dirt trail covered in a layer of rotting leaves, Alec is pretty sure he knows which of those options is going to turn out to be real. 

Sure enough, the Queen says, “No one knows its location — it moves, you see. So the quest to find it is yours, and yours alone.”

“And the second step?” Alec asks, even though he’s pretty sure he knows about this one, too. There was less consensus, but it was possible to eliminate some of the stories as outliers, or at least as particularly unlikely.

The Queen smiles sweetly at him, though, and suddenly he’s _very_ sure he knows what the second step is.

“Drowning,” she says simply.

Alec nods grimly; the legends were right about that one as well, it would seem. Some versions — especially the Mundane ones, which mainly seemed to depict the Fountain as a gentle spring, set into a lush meadow, with frolicking maidens washing each other in its sparkling waters — viewed it a little more kindly, more of a bathing process than actually drowning. But most of the more reliable Downworlder sources had said drowning, specifically, and Alec knows enough about faerie magic to know that if there’s a worse, more cruel version of events, that’s probably the one that’s correct.

He takes a deep breath in and slowly lets it out through his nose. “And the third step?”

“Well,” the Queen says, and pauses in picking her way down the path. The others all halt the instant she does; Alec takes one step farther, and even that feels like a defeat, but manages to contain his motion relatively neatly. “The third step, Alec Lightwood, is where the real trouble lies.”

Alec knows that already. The reason he knows is because the third step is the one on which the legends and stories truly differ — no one can seem to come to a consensus on what it is, which makes him incredibly nervous.

“What is it?” he grits out, trying his best to contain his tone. He’s made his decision; not knowing the specific risks means that he’s had to assume the worst up until this point, and he’s already decided exactly which kinds of things would be dealbreakers, and which wouldn’t. 

The first list is much shorter than the second one.

The Queen smiles at him again, which really pisses him off more than it creeps him out at this point. “The third step is the return.”

He waits for her to continue, but she seems to be convinced that that’s a complete summary. Damn it. He fucking _hates_ trying to get information out of Seelies — there’s a reason he usually lets Izzy handle this — and the Queen, of course, is the worst of all. Alec takes another deep breath: in through the mouth, out through the nose. Careful, slow, not too loud or harsh.

“What does that entail?” he asks as blandly as he can.

The Queen hums, a sweet, amused sound that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and starts walking again.

“The return is the most challenging aspect of the ritual,” she explains, and Alec tries not to worry about how… _enthusiastic_ she sounds. “After the drowning, it is said that the soul is reborn. You will be without memory or knowledge. Only a strong tether will allow you to return to your own life.” 

She falls silent, and Alec takes a moment to carefully consider that. It’s still an incredibly vague and unhelpful and ominous description, and it doesn’t _really_ tell him what the risks are — he has to assume death, but in what sense? Will his body be returned, or will he simply disappear? 

But then he thinks about the mention of a tether, and while he doesn’t know precisely what that means, the idea fills him with a calm certainty.

He nods, drawing himself back up out of his thoughts, and says, “How do we start?”

The Queen laughs with pure delight. 

“We have already begun, Nephilim,” she informs him, and Alec once again has to try incredibly hard not to roll his eyes. Fucking of course they have. “Myself and my council will accompany you to the heart of the Wander-Wood, and then we will leave you, and from there you must find the Fountain yourself.”

They walk in silence after that; Alec is lost in his own thoughts, and the Queen and council certainly don’t seem interested in making idle conversation. The Wander-Wood, as they move steadily deeper and deeper into it, grows darker, the undergrowth more tangled, and even Alec’s deeply ingrained instinct to keep track of where he’s going and know the way out of any given place soon gives up the ghost. He’s hopelessly lost well before they ever reach their destination, but, well, he suspects that that’s the least of his current concerns.

He thinks of Isabelle and Jace, who must have noticed that he’s gone by now. Time moves differently in the faerie realms, of course, so it’s impossible to truly know, but it’s more likely than not. He thinks of their worry, their anger, whenever they finally find the messages he’d left in each of their rooms, explaining that he hasn’t been kidnapped or attacked or otherwise spirited away against his will — that this is his choice. _What_ his choice is, for that matter, at least in the abstract; if he had been to specific, he’d have run too large a risk of them tracking him down and trying to intervene, and he couldn’t — _can’t_ — allow that.

He thinks of the Institute; he’d left paperwork on his desk, and sent copies off to the Clave as well, explaining that he needed to leave on an ‘emergency diplomatic mission’ for an undetermined period of time in a non-specific location, and naming his siblings as co-Acting Heads until he returns. _If_ he returns, which he tries not to think about. But he can’t quite help the pang of guilt at the thought that he’s essentially abandoned his post; there will be fallout to deal with when he returns, probably _extensive_ fallout, but he also just plain feels bad about dereliction of duty. Not nearly bad enough, though, to so much as pause, because he…

He thinks about Magnus.

Alec thinks about the way his voice twists around the words “I will love you forever,” how he knows without even the slightest hint of doubt that Magnus means it. He thinks about the way Magnus has refused to even talk about marriage for more than a few minutes at a time — not because he doesn’t want to, but because he wants to more than anything; he just refuses to actually do it until Alec can have the wedding Magnus claims he deserves, in Idris and all in gold, even though Alec would skip town to marry him in an Elvis chapel in Vegas in half a heartbeat. He thinks about what it feels like to wake up next to him in the morning, how he’s never quite felt as safe as he does with sunlight seeping in through the curtains and shattering across Magnus’ cheekbones. He thinks about these things, and he’s more certain than ever that he knows exactly what the Seelie Queen means by a _strong tether_.

The exact odds of his success are probably impossible to calculate, but he’s well aware that they can’t be high. It doesn’t matter. Alec thinks of Magnus and firmly decides that there’s nothing — _nothing_ — that he will allow to stand in his way.

—

He loses track of how long they’ve been walking pretty quickly; he doesn’t grow tired or even hungry or thirsty, which he’s sure is probably tied into the inherent magic of the Wander-Wood — a compulsion to keep him moving until he’s lost. It’s working in his favor for now, though, because he doesn’t _want_ to stop. The itch to keep moving, to _find_ , burns under his skin until it’s an effort to control his pace and stay in step beside the Queen. Based on the amused glance she sends his way, she can tell.

The Wander-Wood pulls at him, urging him to leave the path — even though ‘path’ is really pretty generous; it’s barely there at this point, just the slightest hint of a trail where it looks like maybe, just maybe, someone else has beaten the undergrowth down a little bit by walking here before. For all that he’d rather be walking next to pretty much _anyone_ else, the advantage to being here with the Queen is that her presence seems to be all it really takes to keep that urging, the whispering voice at the back of his mind that says surely what he’s looking for is just off through the trees a bit, from actually taking over; every time he catches sight of her in the corner of his eye, or hears her humming lightly as she picks her way over a fallen branch, the Wander-Wood seems to fall away a bit, sinking back in the presence of its ruler.

Though maybe that’s just his Shadowhunter upbringing talking. Somehow, Alec doesn’t quite think that something as old and deeply dark as this forest can really be controlled by anyone, not even the Seelie Queen, not if it doesn’t want to be.

When the Queen finally draws to a stop and softly says, “We’re here,” it seems sudden, shocking. Alec really, genuinely doesn’t know how long they’ve been travelling for, or even what time scale he should be guessing at — has it been days? Weeks? It feels like much more than a few hours, but he can’t really _know_ , that’s part of the effect. Surely the Queen wouldn’t leave her court unattended for _too_ long. Surely she and all her closest advisors haven’t been here with him for much longer than a few days at most.

But no matter how convincingly he manages to rationalize it, he can’t _know_. Alec tries, mostly in vain, not to let that terrify him. 

He looks around carefully, trying to get a sense of his surroundings, trying to look for anything that might tell him where to go from here, how to find what he wants. Of course, there’s nothing so simple as a sign saying “Fountain of Youth This Way,” or even anything that seems to indicate the presence of a body of water of any kind. They’re standing in a tiny clearing, with nearly impenetrable and pretty much identical-looking swaths of forest on all side; with Alec, plus the Queen, plus her council, the little glade is pretty cramped. There are flowers around the edges, their petals glowing in the perpetual half-light of the faerie lands, but something about them seems almost sickly.

“This is where we must part ways, Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says, and his attention snaps back to her. She’s watching him with a neutral expression on her face, but a curious gleam in her eyes. “From here, you must seek your way alone.”

Alec nods slowly, looking around the clearing once more. “Once I find the Fountain, do I just… jump in?”

The Queen hums. “No, there are certain… ritual considerations which must be observed in order for the Fountain to have its full effect. Don’t worry. Once you’ve found it, I will join you there, and bring aides to help you prepare.”

“Join me?” His brow furrows. “How?”

“I may not know where the Fountain is, but I will always be able to tell where _you_ are, Nephilim, so long as you remain in my realm,” she tells him airily, and Alec might already be going a little bit insane in these fucking woods, because that’s actually kind of comforting. “When it is time, I will be able to find you.”

There’s not all that much he can do in response to that except nod. The Queen smiles serenely at him, then gestures to her council, and they move toward the edge of the clearing in unison, preparing to follow her back towards the court proper.

“Good luck to you, Alec Lightwood,” the Queen says, and is gone.

“Thank you,” Alec calls after her, stiffly, but by the time he manages to force the words out of his throat she’s long since disappeared into the trees. His words echo back at him in a way that makes him shudder.

He takes a deep, steadying breath. Okay. Well. There are a few options here, he tells himself, and mostly it’s even true, and not just something he’s desperately repeating in his head to try and pretend that he has even a modicum of control over this situation. He could always take the route of just… stepping out, and seeing what he can find. But that sounds dangerously close to — well — _wandering_ in the Wander-Wood, and that never, ever ends well for anyone.

Except, he supposes, for whatever fae creatures inevitably _eat_ the people who get lost in the Wood. So that option is not his favorite, to say the least.

But barring that… He has no map, no guide, not even a cryptic hint from the Seelie Queen. She’d said she didn’t know where the Fountain was, so that _must_ be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t know how to _find_ it. He curses himself for not thinking of that sooner — the fucking Wood has been messing with his head already — but, well, it’s too late now, and besides, even if she _does_ know how to find it, there’s no guarantee she’d tell him. Actually, she probably wouldn’t, so it’s really a moot point anyway.

That does lead him down another train of thought, though. True, no one knows where the Fountain actually is — least of all him — but that doesn’t mean he has to just wander blindly and hope he trips and falls into it. There has to be a _method_. There has to be _something_.

Sighing, Alec sits down in the grass in the middle of the clearing — he’s less likely to wander off that way, he supposes, if he gets deep enough into his own thoughts to fall prey more easily to the magic of the Wood — and begins to catalogue, for approximately the one billionth time, everything he’s been able to discover about the Fountain of Youth.

It’s in the faerie lands, specifically the Seelie realm. It is, in fact, a body of water, and probably a rather large one, if the few fae writings he’d found on the matter were to be believed. It is a focal point of intense magical power — deep, old, wild magic, nothing as (comparatively) tame as the ley lines Alec is more familiar with, but something far darker than that and far more difficult to control.

If it _were_ connected to the ley lines, then he could track them using runes and hopefully be lead right to the Fountain, but he doesn’t have Clary’s skill with runes, nor any complex grasp of magical theory, so he has no hope of trying to modify a rune to let him see the eddies of wild magic instead.

Even still, he thinks, the magic is probably his best lead. His heart pangs with a thought of Magnus; no doubt he would have had a stroke of brilliance and figured out some way to tap into the wild magic and lead Alec straight to the Fountain by now. And, far more importantly, if he were here Alec would be able to press up against his side and know that he’s not just out here alone in the woods. 

—

He sits there in the clearing for an unknown amount of time, seconds and minutes and perhaps hours slipping away. Surprisingly, the Wood doesn’t seem to be having much effect on him — he’d been expecting the pull to increase once he was no longer walking side-by-side with the Queen herself, but it’s still just a quiet whisper in the back of his mind. Somehow, even when his thoughts begin to drift — the exact sort of opening the magic of the Wander-Wood would usually seize in order to take hold, if anything he’s ever learned about it is true — the urge to get up and see what there is among the trees is easy enough to catalogue as the Seelie realm’s patented brand of mental manipulation and subsequently ignore.

Alec frowns slightly, shifting his stance on the forest floor. He longs, briefly, for a notebook, or anything, really, that he could write on; having some way to physically track and catalogue his knowledge and try to decipher the tidbits of legend and myth swirling around in his brain might not actually help at all, but at least he’d be able to feel like he was doing something productive, rather than just sitting on the ground in the heart of the Wander-Wood.

Rubbing a hand over his face, he indulges in a put-upon sigh. “Fucking Seelie magic,” he mutters, and flops back to lie down in the grass.

He runs through what he knows yet again. Large body of water. Wild magic. Like the ley lines, but not. He scrubs a hand through his hair roughly; if only, he thinks again, if only it _were_ the ley lines, or if only he knew the first fucking thing about where to find wild magic —

Alec goes abruptly still. Turns his head, very slowly. Looks out into the Wander-Wood.

Fucking Seelies. Of _course_.

The Wood itself is wild magic; that much should have been relatively obvious after spending this much time (however much time that actually is) in it, really, even if Alec _hadn’t_ had lectures about the basic features of the faerie lands throughout his childhood and adolescence as a basic part of his training. Which, of course, he _had_.

He’s going to have to beat his head against a wall later — as soon as he can _find_ a wall — but that can wait for now.

It only takes a few moments for the high of his epiphany to dim, though, under the grudging realization that this knowledge… doesn’t actually help him all that much. Yes, the Wood is seeped in — is _made_ of — wild magic, presumably the same wild magic that pools in the Fountain of Youth, and yes, now that he knows that, he’s certain, somehow, that the Queen bringing him here specifically must have more significance than she’d let on, but that doesn’t actually get him any closer to knowing where to start looking for the Fountain, because the sum total of his knowledge of magical theory could still fit in a thimble. Being surrounded on all sides by wild magic doesn’t mean he has the slightest clue what to do with it, or how to use it to figure out where he needs to go.

Okay, maybe the thimble thing is a _bit_ of an exaggeration — he is madly in love with the High Warlock of Brooklyn — but still.

“How the fuck am I supposed to…” he grumbles to himself, but he doesn’t finish the thought, just sighs and shuts his eyes against the sight of the faerie sky.

In between one moment and the next, in the space of a heartbeat, as he lets his body relax into the grass, something about the world slips sideways and feels abruptly _wrong._

Alec doesn’t even realize the source of his own sudden unease at first. The silence is so instantaneous and absolute that his mind scrambles for several seconds to try and identify what’s missing from his senses, even as he feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Then, all at once, it clicks: the pull of the Wander-Wood, the whispering voice trying to draw him out into the trees, is gone. _Completely_ gone.

It’s so unexpected that all he can manage to do is lie there frozen in shock, the unexpected quiet ringing in his ears. 

And then, suddenly, the silence breaks. 

_All you need do is ask, Nephilim._

Slowly, so slowly, Alec sits up, wishing more than anything for the familiar weight of his bow against his back, even if he’s well aware it would be useless here. He had surrendered it to the care of the Seelie Knights as a sign of good faith, a decision which now strikes him as especially naive. 

“Who are you?” he asks; it isn’t meant to be a whisper, but the clearing around him is still so quiet — the words, he realizes, had been spoken directly into his head. He’s really the one who’s broken the silence. 

As he stares around, wide-eyed, the trees of the Wander-Wood seem suddenly to shiver and glow, and Alec realizes that he has his answer. 

“How is this possible?”

It’s a stupid question — magic, obviously, _wild_ magic — but this time he gets an actual answer.

_Only at my heart can you come to seek true answers,_ the Wander-Wood tells him, and maybe it shouldn’t, but it completely stuns Alec, to know that all those souls who’ve been lost among these trees, stories stretching back across all of existence about people who go into the woods looking for something and never come back out — the thing that all of those people were searching for really _was_ here all along. He wonders how many of them have ever found it.

Alec suddenly has a slightly better understanding of what Clary must have felt like standing face-to-face with Raziel.

He tries to make his mouth work, but nothing comes out. He’s… completely wrung out, blown away. Speech is currently far, far outside the realm of possibility.

The Wood, apparently, is capable of taking pity on people — and _that_ , on top of everything else, threatens to truly shock Alec into catatonia — because the words _You seek the water_ bloom across Alec’s mind.

“Yes,” he manages. “Yes. But I… I don’t know how — I know that if I could reach the, the magic, I could track it. Like — you know, like the ley lines, almost. But I don’t know _how_.”

_All you need do is ask, Nephilim_ , the Wood says a second time, and Alec fights to breathe. 

“How?”

_The same magic runs here,_ the Wood tells him, and all at once something rushes under Alec’s skin and he can _see_ it. Magic — it can _only_ be magic — pulses, iridescent, in every direction. It shimmers off of everything, every leaf and rock and twig, sand it swirls through the air, all-consuming.

But, the more his eyes adjust, the more Alec realizes that there are… veins, arteries, flowing away from where he stands at the heart of the Wood. They disappear off into the trees, in all different directions, and Alec takes a deep breath in and he can almost _taste_ them, like electricity crackling on the back of his tongue.

His heart seizes desperately — there are still so _many_ , how will he know which ones lead to the Fountain? — but as soon as his destination crosses his mind, he can smell seawater, and he turns automatically to face one side of the clearing, where there are violets growing around the bases of the trees.

“Why are you doing this?” he gasps, unable to stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth, because if this is real, if it’s not some sort of trick, then he can’t think of any possible reason that the Wander-Wood would be _helping_ him unless it wants something in return, or unless it gets something out of this situation, and Alec doesn’t know what he even has to give.

The magic weaving through the trees hums.

_Because you are here,_ the Wood tells him simply. _And all those who come here, to the very heart of me, discover the path to what they seek._

Alec frowns. “But I’m only here because the Queen… because she…” 

Why would she bring him here? She must have known about this — she _has_ to have known, there’s no way she didn’t — but he’s not used to the idea of the Seelie Queen being _helpful_ , and frankly, the idea terrifies him. He’s absolutely positive that there will be a catch, he just doesn’t know what it _is_ yet.

_Regardless_ , the Wood says when Alec’s voice trails off, fear chilling his veins, _you are here._

There’s certainly truth in that, Alec supposes.

He takes a deep breath and clambers to his feet on unsteady legs. Okay, he tells himself. This is fine. It turns out that the versions of the legend where there’s a guide to help the questing party on their way had had it right after all, and the Queen had just… mislead him a bit, all while really practically handing him a map. That kind of nonsense is hardly unlike her.

Carefully, he steps forward, toward the violets and the salty tang of seawater. But then he hesitates; having taken even one step away from the center of the clearing, from the heart of the Wander-Wood, he can hear the normal whispering just barely beginning to start up again, and somehow he knows that whatever the fuck this odd encounter has been, it’s almost over now.

So, uncertain, he clears his throat and says, “Uh, thank you,” before stepping somewhat more confidently out towards the trees — towards, he knows, the Fountain.

He barely catches the _You are welcome, Nephilim_ that floats after him, but he doesn’t quite manage to miss the way it sounds… amused. He’d be much happier with this whole situation, he grouses to himself, if ancient and powerful fae creatures would stop finding him _funny._

—

The whispering pull of the Wood _does_ grow stronger as he moves steadily away from its heart, but not enough to really constitute a problem, not now that Alec has a path to follow. Slowly, many of the veins of magic start to disperse, until he’s just following one pearlescent strand and the smell of salt and violets through the trees.

The Wood grows periodically denser, and less dense; the air around him gets darker, and less dark. Alec still has no grasp of time, nothing to mark his passage — the Wood’s gift hadn’t helped with _that_ ; most of the magic of the faerie lands still affects him — and exactly how _far_ he’s gone is equally mysterious. The smell of the water doesn’t seem to be getting any weaker or stronger. Though there’s just that one tendril of magic beneath his feet, it’s steady. He tries not to let the less-than-comforting ignorance that comes with being in the faerie lands bother him too much and. With the new distraction of watching the magic stretch out in front of him like a fine rope, he mostly succeeds.

Just because he knows which way to go doesn’t mean the going is easy. The path of the magic isn’t winding; it cuts straight through the forest, not concerned with which direction would make the journey easiest for, say, a Shadowhunter hell-bent on attaining immortal life. Alec fords streams, clambers over fallen logs that seem almost impossibly large, and, at one point, scales a short cliff. Still, in all of that time and through all of those strenuous activities, even when he breaks a sweat, he doesn’t hunger or thirst, even though instincts not attuned to the faerie lands are screaming at him that he should have long since keeled over from dehydration.

He follows that lone tendril of magic for what seems like an impossibly long time before he finally sees what he deems to be progress.

The smell of the water still hasn’t grown stronger, but, after an unknowably long time, he spots a shimmer through the trees, and then another, and another, and slowly they grow closer together and he understands: other veins of the same wild magic he’s tracking, starting to converge. His pace quickens, and his heartbeat with it. The magic will meet, he knows, at the Fountain. 

More and more and more magic pours through the trees, until the trail he’s following is twice as wide as his armspan, and finally the smell of salt water grows so strong he can taste it on the back of his tongue, and it’s joined by the sweet scent of the violets growing so thickly that he can’t help but crush them underfoot, and he doesn’t realize that he’s cresting the final hill until he does it and sees the water spreading out before him, the tree line abruptly ending, a rough, choppy sea reaching out for the horizon and beyond.

The Fountain is far from the idyllic imagery he’s spent almost a year poring over; its surface is harsh, as though beaten by a nonexistent wind, as though constantly ready for the break of a storm. The water itself is almost pitch black, and there’s no way to tell how deep it is, though he supposes it doesn’t really matter. It could be no deeper than a puddle and it would still fill his lungs, force out all the air. If a nexus is a point where two ley lines cross, then this — the water, the _Fountain_ — is to a nexus as a breath of air is to a star. Its power, even to someone completely incapable of shaping or even really seeing or feeling magic without outside assistance, is undeniable, breathtaking, and horrible. Alec has been in the presence of great and terrible power before, but this — this is like nothing else in this world or any other.

He shuts his eyes for only a moment before he starts to descend.


	2. Immersion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Go, then, and the blessings of faerie go with you.”
> 
> Alec doesn’t much like the sound of the blessings of faerie, if he is to be completely honest, but he steps forward into the water anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW in this chapter for depiction of drowning. It's relatively brief, but I want to be safe. If you need to skip that bit, you can stop reading as Alec walks into the water and then just scroll to the next section divider.
> 
> Part 3 will be coming in a week! Stay tuned, lovelies. <3

“I must say, Alec Lightwood, I am still curious about one thing,” the Queen says, in her deceptively light and childish voice, as two of her warriors spread some sort of cold substance across Alec’s bare chest that feels like tar and smells like charcoal. He had stood at the edge of the water for what felt like no more than a moment before she was suddenly there, bringing not just her council but several attendants as well. Witnesses, he thinks, to what may be either his destruction or his rebirth, and either way they’ll probably find it pretty damn entertaining. 

Alec sort of wishes she’d taken an older form for something like this; there’s always been something even _more_ disturbing about her doing already-disturbing things in the guise of a child, but then again, he’s absolutely certain that that’s the point of doing it. 

He quirks an eyebrow when he finally replies. “Just one?”

The Queen smiles at him beatifically, but her eyes never lose their sharpness. “Well, your reasoning is obvious. You aren’t the first to attempt to chose an immortal life with the one you love, you know.”

He knows. He’s read all the stories he could find on the subject. “So your question is…?”

“Why us?” The Queen spreads her arms delicately, indicating, it seems, the whole of her court. “I suspect you know many vampires who would be more than willing to assist you with this endeavor, and while the turning process can be quite painful, it’s nothing compared to what you’ve asked us to do to you here.”

“What you’ve _agreed_ to do,” Alec points out, because she has; that’s the reason he’s now standing here mostly naked and covered in some weird black shit, shivering at the unexpected chill in the air as he stands on a patch of dark rock that overlooks a gunmetal-gray sea that’s unlike any part of the Seelie realm he’s ever seen before.

The Queen all but smirks at him. “Indeed.” 

But she’s still clearly waiting for an answer to her question, and it’s even less in Alec’s best interest to antagonise her than it usually is, so he takes a leaf from her book — which he supposes he’d better get used to — and tells the truth, if only in part. “There are downsides to vampirism which would have impacted my ability to do my job as head of the Institute.”

The Seelie Queen actually laughs at him. What’s worse, she sounds entirely delighted, rather than just flatly mocking, which is what he might have expected.

“You’re so confident you’ll keep your position, even when you no longer age and die?” she asks, her eyes shining. “How despotic.”

Alec almost, almost rolls his eyes. “I didn’t say I intended to remain there _forever_. But… for now.”

“And they will let you keep the title even when you have become Faerie-touched?” 

That, Alec knows — and knows that the Queen knows he knows, too — is more likely to be the actual problem, not his impending immortality, at least within the next couple of decades or so. But, well, he’ll face that when he faces it. He inclines his head with a wry smile, an acknowledgement of her point, but not a concession.

“I also didn’t want to appear to be picking sides,” he continues, apropos of nothing, because it’s better than going down _that_ road. The Queen arches a brow in question, so he explains, “Between Magnus and Raphael Santiago. I don’t know if I’d ever hear the end of it if I went behind Magnus’ back with Raphael to give up my mortal life.” And it _would_ have been going behind Magnus’ back; just as Magnus can’t know he’s here until the process is done, Alec wouldn’t exactly have been able to casually discuss vampirism, either.

“Ah.” The Queen sounds genuinely amused. Alec resents that he’s reached a point in his life where he can reliably distinguish the Seelie Queen’s genuine amusement, because it’s a skill that derives itself only from extended practice, which is incredibly unfortunate for him. “I’m glad to know domestic concerns play a role even in decisions as serious as this one.”

“I’m sure you are,” Alec mutters.

She seems content with his answer, though, and as her aides spread what seems to be the last of the odd dark substance over his skin and start to step away, he can’t help but turn her curiosity back onto her.

“Why are you allowing this?” _Other than the fact that it could kill me_ , he adds in his head. But then he thinks of the Wander-Wood — _Regardless,_ it had said, _you are here_ , and then it had given him everything he needed, practically held his hand and lead him here — and he slowly says, “Why are you _helping_ me?”

The Queen’s eyes gleam. “I suspect we’ll make a Seelie of you yet, Alec Lightwood.”

His stomach roils a bit at the thought. _Magnus_ , he reminds himself. _For Magnus_. “Is that… why?”

She smiles, just slightly, and moves behind him, until he can’t see her anymore. He almost thinks she won’t answer, but then she says, “Very good. In time I think you will come to understand us even better than your lovely sister does. Though you, of course, will have a distinct advantage over her should this all go to plan.”

It shouldn’t surprise him that it’s for power, for influence — it _doesn’t_ , actually, to be more precise. But it does surprise him somehow that that’s all it is, that she deems him a valuable enough figure to be worth anything to her at all, let alone all this trouble, that she expects him to be able to carry her requests or her influence or whatever to Idris with any more authority than she herself already has. He suspects the Clave would disagree with her assessment of his worth in their eyes, but decides to keep that observation to himself. 

“But you were the one who just said I’d have trouble keeping my position for more than a few decades, _if_ that,” he points out, turning slightly to try and make eye contact, or at least to be able to have a better sense of where she is. She eludes him, moving out of view before he even really starts to move. “There has to be something else, other than just having a Faerie-touched Shadowhunter at the Institute.”

“There is,” she admits easily enough, and he snaps his head back around to find that she’s standing in front of him again. Damn Seelies. There’s something absolutely predatory about her smile — not that that’s unusual for her in the slightest, it’s just not normally so bare, completely unveiled. “This is a rather large favor to be owed by the High Warlock of Brooklyn, wouldn’t you imagine? An eternity with the one true love of his life?”

“Ah,” Alec says, because it’s the only thing he can say, because his hands are clenched into fists suddenly and he’s so blisteringly angry at himself for not seeing this sooner, for not realizing that she’d turn this into some sort of leverage over Magnus. Whatever influence or favor she claims from him, _whatever_ she wants him to do, anything — well, almost anything — would be worth it to Alec. But Magnus? Suddenly he feels a fear more consuming and acute than he any he’s experienced since he got here. “Domestic concerns.”

“Indeed.” She seems quite pleased to have her own words parroted back at her, and she seems equally pleased at the effect she’s having, because of course she is, it’s what she _does_ ; there’s that damn amusement again. Alec will be so, so happy if he never makes another faerie smile again in his entire life, no matter how long that ends up being.

But apparently she’s done with him for now, or maybe the preparations are just finished; regardless, she turns and steps away, saying something quietly to one of her attendants as she does. 

Almost immediately there are hands at his arms and back, just light touches. They’ve stripped him down and replaced his clothes with some sort of white loincloth thing, made of something that he thinks is linen, and somehow the white against his pale thighs just makes them look even paler. Faerie hands urge at his bare skin, and without giving him the opportunity to protest or even think about it, they lead him towards the water. 

They stop just at the edge. There’s not really a shore to speak of, certainly nothing like a beach; the water starts and ends abruptly, the stone that borders it dropping off suddenly into depth. How much depth, he doesn’t know; the Fountain is dark and almost opaque, almost resembling oil more than water. But it still smells like water — like the sea, except under that is still that lingering note of violets. 

One of the faeries murmurs something he can’t quite catch, the wind whipping the words away even though they’re probably not even in a language he understands, and then for a heartbeat everything is quiet. Then the Queen’s voice rings out, bright and clear. 

“Surrender your mortal life on these shores, and emerge renewed, Alec Lightwood, Nephilim,” she says. The words somehow have an air both of ceremony and whimsy; they make him shiver, though that could just be that he’s mostly nude and half-covered in some kind of goop that’s still wet. 

“I will,” he murmurs; his voice is quiet, but he surprises himself with how steady and clear it is. 

He can almost _smell_ the Queen’s victorious smile. “Go, then, and the blessings of faerie go with you.”

Alec doesn’t much like the sound of the blessings of faerie, if he is to be completely honest, but he steps forward into the water anyway. 

It _feels_ like normal water, or at least it’s no more resistant to his movement, not thick and viscous and strange to move through as he imagines ankle-deep oil would be. But it clings to his skin from the first step, right off the edge of the flat rock and into the Fountain. He doesn’t hesitate to keep moving, slow and steady, sinking himself deeper and deeper. 

By the time it reaches his knees, he realizes something odd. The loincloth the faeries had dressed him in reaches from his hips halfway to the ground, and at first he doesn’t even really understand what’s odd about the fact that the tips of it just sink straight down through the water; he just knows that it makes him frown, some tingling instinct telling him that it isn’t quite right, an almost uncanny valley-ish sensation. It’s only when the water reaches his thighs that he realizes what’s strange: no matter how much it resembles oil, or even normal water, the Fountain has no buoyancy to it, none at all. The light linen of his garment should float and move easily on the surface, but it doesn’t; it sinks down to billow against his legs instead. He tests this theory by trying to float his fingertips on the surface and achieves the same result, and his gut lurches. 

Well. That ought to make it much easier to drown, at least. 

In the end, there’s really not a lot he can do but keep walking. The farther he gets from shore, the easier it is to forget that the fae are there at all; all he can do is focus on the sensation of the water climbing higher and higher up his body and chant in his head, _Magnus, Magnus, Magnus._

When the surface reaches the stuff they’d spread on his chest, finally, it lances through him like fire; Alec isn’t sure if it’s actually burning or if the water is just so cold that everything else feels blistering hot by comparison, but either way it makes him gasp and jolt to a stop despite himself.

“Fuck,” he gasps out, more a soundless exhalation than anything, more breath than speech. It’s not exquisitely painful — he’s had much, much worse — but it’s damn distracting, and it’s a long while before his breathing becomes close to even again, before the sensation starts to fade, before he starts to acclimate.

Eventually it fades to just warmth, trickling up his chest to his throat, following the strokes across his chest in the shape of faerie fingers. He feels it, acutely, as it seems to center itself just above his collarbone; he’s sure, in the moment, that something is being seared into the flesh there, but he has no way of knowing what, or even if that half-wild conclusion is accurate at all. 

_Magnus, Magnus_ , his brain reminds him as the burning starts to fade.

He keeps walking.

The water goes on as far as he can see; the horizon is just choppy waves and that perpetual faerie-twilight sky. Alec forces himself to keep walking, to take step after step, and the water licks higher up his body, reaching his shoulders, his throat, his chin.

He knows it’s probably more ceremonial and majestic if he keeps on walking slowly — knows the Seelie Queen would probably choreograph it that way — but even over the _Magnus, Magnus, Magnus_ in his head he knows there’s no fucking way that he’ll actually be able to do it slow, not like this, not with the warm sensation still settled at the hollow above his collarbone and his breath quickening despite himself as the water rises to lap at his mouth.

It tastes disgusting. Probably this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Alec pulls an entirely out-of-place face of disgust when he accidentally gets some in his mouth. _Eugh_.

Okay, but — it’s now or never, he realizes, and hates himself a little for the cliche. He looks at the horizon again; he shuts his eyes and pictures himself in a certain loft in Brooklyn, curled up on a couch that’s older than he is and has seen him naked more times than he can count. Without stopping to think about it any more than that, Alec _runs_ the last few paces forward, rushing in all that once until the water is up over the top of his head and then after that, too, far enough that he thinks there’s no way he could reflexively kick off the bottom and really get anywhere. The water still doesn’t drag at him like oil would, but it’s only as he sprints through it that he realizes that it doesn’t even drag at him like normal _water_ would; there’s so little resistance to his motion that, if not for the biting cold and the all-consuming wetness against his skin, he’d almost be able to believe he was in open air.

Alec keeps his eyes stubbornly open the whole time, and, despite the salty sea water smell, they don’t really burn. There’s not really anything to see, just blackness, but he keeps them open anyway. Some deeply ingrained instinct is demanding that he face his death staring straight ahead, eyes wide to see it coming.

He fully intends to just stand there, submerged, and let it happen, but all at once there’s a harsh current that catches at his shoulders and back and throws him deeper into the water, throws him horizontal until all he can do is sink and sink and sink, like a stone. 

The current continues to pull him, though, and he can tell he’s going deeper and deeper, because he never touches the bottom, he just keeps _falling_. He lets out a surprised yell and immediately water fills his mouth, his lungs; he’s squinting desperately upwards, trying to make out even a hint of light from above, but there’s nothing anymore, nothing, all at once everything is gone and there’s just this inky black —

_Magnus,_ he thinks, amidst the hurricane of thoughts and the horrible shoving, tumbling, sinking sensations that are warring against his skin. His chest is burning, his lungs trying desperately to force out the water and failing, over and over again, only succeeding in bringing more in. It stings somehow, the bite of it icy cold all through him, and again he thinks, _Magnus_. 

Alec closes his eyes.

—

There is something above him, blindingly bright. _The sun_ , he thinks, though it’s odd; the rest of the world is almost twilit, but that’s certainly the sun. How does that work, he wonders? He isn’t sure how long he’s been staring at it; his eyes feel very dry, though, and there are white spots winking in and out of existence in his vision, so maybe it’s been a long time.

He blinks, carefully, and very slowly feels thoughts come together in his head. He’s lying on rocks — small, smooth, round ones, judging by the sample he can feel under his hands. They’re cold, and wet, and so is he. He’s nearly bare, with just a scrap of fabric clinging around his hips. His throat, when he swallows, is painful, as though he’s been choking. All around him is the thick smell of violets, cloying, filling his lungs with every breath he takes. He thinks about these things first, because these are the things he knows, things he can observe and catalogue.

Everything else is… blank.

He doesn’t know who he is. Or where he is. Or how long he’s been here. Or why he’s wet. Or why he’s all but naked. Or what — when he sits up slowly and takes a better look at himself — the black marks on his skin are, or where his scars came from, or if his whole body is always slick like he’s been covered in oil.

Or where to go. Or what to do.

For the time being, it seems to be enough to just stop looking at the sun, to let his head hang to the side, damp hair clinging to his forehead, and stare down at his own body instead. Slowly, the white spots fade from his vision, and slowly, the pain in his throat begins to ease. Other sensations begin to filter in: the gentle lap of water onto shore, a cool breeze that dries his skin and makes him shiver, a weary, mindless tiredness that makes him think that, whatever he had been doing before he woke up here — because he _must_ have been doing something, mustn’t he? — it probably wasn’t very pleasant.

But there’s something else, he realizes, something underneath all of that, growing stronger by the second — stronger and stronger the longer he lays there on the stones and listens to the water and smells the smell of violets. It’s… uncomfortable, and it makes him feel anxious, like there’s something he needs to be doing. He shuts his eyes and frowns, trying to focus in on it, figure out where it’s coming from, why it’s there, what it wants. Eventually, he decides that it’s located somewhere in his stomach, and it’s…

_Pulling_ him.

Yes. That feels right, that thought. It feels like someone’s stuck a fishhook in his navel and is pulling on the other end of the line, pulling him towards — he doesn’t know what, but _something_. And the longer he stays still, the harder the pull. He tests it, by staying stock-still as long as he can stand, and with every passing second, he feels more and more like he’ll climb out of his own skin if it makes the tugging sensation go away.

Honestly, it’s a relief: it’s something to _do_ , something other than lie in silence and take careful note of himself and his surroundings. He has no idea what it means, no idea _why_ he’s being pulled away from his place here on the stones, but he’s willing to go along with it for now.

He sits up, slowly. His bones and muscles and joints and tendons all cry out their displeasure at the motion, but the tugging in his gut seems thrilled, and even more so when he stands, legs shaking. 

He has to focus on it for several long seconds, with the discomfort worsening again the longer he stays still, but eventually he’s mostly certain he’s determined the correct direction to go in. Behind him is water, dark and somehow forbidding, smelling of salt and violets; it makes him shiver. 

The pull is leading him away from the water. He isn’t sure quite why, but he finds that thought incredibly comforting, beyond even the fact that the water seems… generally unpleasant. 

He starts to walk. 

—

He walks for ages and ages and ages. 

Around him, as he goes, the landscape slowly starts to morph; he leaves the smooth stones and the water behind fairly quickly and finds himself walking through gently rolling hills, with short, silvery grass that pricks at the bottoms of his bare feet not enough to really hurt, but enough to make the going uncomfortable. Still, he keeps walking. 

He has nothing even approaching a concept of time. The sky seems permanently locked in twilight, casting everything beneath it in odd shadows, and all he knows is that he needs to keep walking, that he is being pulled toward something and that the world around him is, in fact, slowly changing. For example, the grasses eventually start to get longer under his feet, and darker and bluer — but then they slowly fade back to short and prickly and silver, so perhaps that’s not really an indication of anything at all. Regardless, the pull in his belly says _keep going_ , and he does. 

—

Slowly, certain concepts start to make sense to him. Like _here_. He carefully, hesitantly, begins to form a picture of what _here_ might mean. Really, it starts when he reaches the river, which is the first undeniable, sudden change in the world around him since he left the waterside behind and started making his way across the grass. 

The river, to be fair, is really more of a stream, but it’s very different from the other water — clear and rushing gently, smelling mostly of mud and not salt or violets or anything else, not forbidding or ominous at all, and so it fascinates him. He approaches it without even really meaning to, even though the tug in his gut doesn’t seem especially thrilled. 

He kneels, briefly, at the side of the river, and looks down into it, enchanted. It takes him a moment to parse the face looking back at him, distorted on the surface of the water as it bubbles over the rocks on the riverbed. That’s _him_ , he realizes. His reflection — his own face. 

The eyes looking back at him are the most striking part. They’re blue. He doesn’t know why that seems unsettling. 

He sits there and stares down at himself until he can’t anymore, until the anxiety starts to really kick in again and the pull in his gut decidedly _won’t_ be ignored anymore. It’s only then, and only begrudgingly, that he gets up. 

And that is how he decides on his concept of _here_ , as he walks away, starting back on the path he doesn’t understand but feels compelled to: if the river is _there,_ back behind him where he isn’t allowed to linger, bending in its path away and out of sight so that he doesn’t even have the excuse to cross it, then where he walks with short sharp grasses underfoot must be _here_. 

_Here_ has a few key characteristics.

For one thing, there are the grasses here, and the sky. But eventually, as he walks and walks, there are trees here — at first just one or two, sporadically, interrupting the plain, but then there are more, clumps of them, and then all at once he’s in a little forest. He’s not sure how that happened, but it did, and with the forest come more and more changes to the world he’s moving through.

For instance: the people. There are people here — people, and creatures — and they all look so _different_ , from him and from one another, with wildly varying hair and skin and eyes, and some of them with other things too: pointy teeth, or limbs that look so long and thin he worries they’ll snap right off, or fluttering wings. Some are much larger than him, some much smaller, but they’re all bound together by a sort of wildness. Something makes him feel almost like that should worry him, or at least that it _means_ something, but he can’t parse it. At first he catches only glimpses of one or two — the first one he sees _terrifies_ him — but eventually there are so many, more and more and more, until the differences really become clear, until he’s caught sight of so many beings off through the trees that the variety of them is patently obvious.

He doesn’t approach any of them for a long time, and they don’t approach him, either, but he can feel them watching him, the number of eyes following him increasing steadily the longer he walks. Sometimes he thinks he hears whispers, but as soon as he tries to focus on what they’re saying, even if he doesn’t turn his head to look, the voices always fall away.

He’s fine with that for a while — curious, yes, _obviously_ , but he’s curious about _everything_ that he sees and doesn’t see, and the tug in his gut is insistent enough to keep him moving forward rather than stopping to really question anything.

No, they won’t come close or let him overhear what they’re saying, but one cool morning he wakes up to find a bundle of clothes waiting for him — much warmer and sturdier than the scrap of fabric currently dangling off of his hips. He hesitates for just a moment, his hands hovering uncertainly over the fabric, before he calls out a “Thank you” and hopes it reaches the relevant party. The clothes are odd, and kind of scratchy, made of some kind of weirdly fibrous fabric that he doesn’t think he’s familiar with, but they’re very tough and easy to move in, and again, much better than what he’d had before, so he’ll take what he can get.

Even after that, though, none of the people come close to him on their own, and certainly none of them come to talk to him. His curiosity grows and grows as he becomes accustomed to the scratch of his new clothes against his skin and as he progresses through the forest. With every step he takes, it seems that the trees are getting denser, closer together. There are all sorts of other things in the forest, too, beyond just the trees: odd, jagged stones that sparkle like starlight, and flowers that snap at his heels, and little ferns that uncurl and release puffs of a heady scent when he walks near them. But none of these things can talk to him, and he knows that if he could just get close enough to one of them, the people _could_. Maybe — he can’t allow himself to really hope, but just _maybe_ — one of them would even know something about him, about who he is or maybe about the thing that’s pulling him ever forward from just behind his navel.

But none of them get close enough, and his attempts to chase them only scare them away, so his curiosity is left to grow in silence.

—

He becomes aware, eventually, of the thing living under his skin.

He has no idea what it is, no more than he has about anything else, but it feels… It feels like a thunderstorm, trapped just barely inside him, constantly trying to get out. It feels _dangerous_ , though somehow he thinks it’s not dangerous to _him_. But he — he doesn’t want to hurt anyone else. The thought of the storm ripping out of him, out towards someone else, when him just trying to _talk_ to any of the people here has them running away, makes him feel so sick that he has to shut his eyes and focus on his breathing.

He won’t let that happen, he decides. He doesn’t know anything about what it is or how to control it, but he won’t let it be cruel.

It doesn’t bother him as much when he’s walking, though he’s not sure if that’s because the passing scenery simply offers a distraction, or becuase the thunderstorm feeling is connected to the tug in his gut, somehow. It does seem like when he stops, when the anxiety and the need to keep seeking start to grow, the whatever-it-is inside him starts to grow, too, and grow wilder and fiercer. He doesn’t like it; it’s worse than before, when all he had to worry about if he paused in his journey was a little bit of an itchy feeling, a desire to move.

He doesn’t like it at all.

He stops pausing nearly so often.

The forest around him slowly grows thicker — wilder, somehow — and the storm clouds under his skin slowly grows stronger, until, before he’s even realized it, he’s spending all his time walking much faster than he had been before. He even jogs sometimes now, when the ground is least treacherous and he can avoid tripping over gnarled roots and thick patches of undergrowth; his legs start to burn under him and it’s only when the stitch in his side finally overtakes the discomfort of both the tug in his gut and the odd thing simmering under his skin when he finally slows to a walk again.

The fact that everything seems to be accelerating isn’t lost on him, but he doesn’t know what it means, has _no way_ of knowing what it means, or what anything means. He’s proceeding so quickly now that he rarely sees other people or creatures anymore. Perhaps they’re avoiding him, or perhaps he just isn’t noticing them anymore because whatever curiosity he’d been feeling has been replaced by the almost single-minded need to keep moving in perpetuity.

In fact, by the time he sees the girl, she is the first person he’s seen in… well, he doesn’t have any means of measuring time, not when the sky never changes, but he feels like it must have been half an age at least.

She stands at the top of a hill; he crests it, after an endless time of walking quickly through the woods, and feels his stomach lurch at the sight. He doesn’t even notice her at first, instead seeing only what stands behind her: a gateway of sorts, woven of thorns and branches and ferns. And under the thorns and branches and ferns is a glowing thing, vaguely shapeless and somehow hard to look at directly. He can’t see through it, but somehow _past_ it, and he feels an intense tug in his gut and knows that this is his way forward.

But then. Then, he sees the girl. 

She is small, and slight, with deep red hair almost like blood; her ears are pointed, and something green curls around the edges of her face, and he knows without even thinking about it that she is incredibly old and deadly. Without knowing anything about her, he can feel it in his bones.

Despite the urge — the _incredible_ , almost crushing urge — to go through whatever passage she’s standing in front of, to keep moving as fast as he can, he hesitates, slows to a stop, and stares at her. She stares right back, with something cruel and amused in her eyes.

“I must say,” she says, and he startles incredibly at the noise, having not even noticed she was preparing herself to speak before the words were already ringing in his ears. “I am impressed that you have made it here. My people have taken you as one of our own, and offered you their assistance, but it is no small thing to have come this far anyway.”

He frowns. This girl, he decides, is not just old and deadly: she is a particular danger to him, somehow. He stares at her distrustfully; she smiles back, looking amused, which is irritating, because why would she be amused by someone not trusting her? 

“Who are you?” he asks, brow furrowed. 

She doesn’t answer, but her smile grows even more. She gestures almost magnanimously towards the glowing space, as though encouraging him to just get over his strange nerves and take this step towards the pull in his stomach, the way he’s been taking step after step after step towards it all this time. 

Well. It’s not as though he dislikes the suggestion. And, frankly, she’s one of the least odd things he’s experienced, even though she _is_ pretty strange. So he settles for pinning her with a suspicious look and walking forward, trying to avoid turning his back to her at any point.

Just before he reaches the glowing space — it seems to hum; he wonders if that’s normal or if it means it’s going to hurt him somehow, but he has no way of knowing, so he tries not to worry about it — she makes a small noise, as though to get his attention. He stops immediately and looks back at her. The smile is gone; her face is entirely serious now, though there’s a dangerous glint in her eyes.

“Enjoy your eternity,” she says serenely, and then goes back to just staring at him in silence.

He has no idea what _that_ means, but she seems done, and the tugging in his gut is growing more insistent with every passing second, so he swallows hard and steps into the glowing space, his eyes shut tight against the white light.

They stay shut tight as he passes through something fuzzy-feeling and claustrophobic — it feels like his chest is being constricted, but he forces himself to keep walking, feeling the storm under his skin grow more and more anxious as the deeply uncomfortable feeling lingers, in ways it hasn’t since he very first became aware of it. But then he takes just one more step and a whole different reality crashes over his head.

He opens his eyes and it’s _daylight_. Very early morning, but not dawn, and certainly not the perpetual twilight he’s grown so accustomed to. He’s standing on a bridge; there are people _everywhere_ , and they all look fairly normal, and none of them are dressed in leaves and only a few in leather. A woman jogs by and gives him a very suspicious look, and he takes a deep, shaky breath of air that tastes like smoke-but-not. 

There are trees here, but in the distance there are tall buildings, and he feels the pull that way, so he goes, not even stopping to notice how that one woman is far from the only person looking at him like he’s an especially odd and potentially dangerous phenomenon.

He walks all morning and doesn’t stop. He walks all afternoon and into the evening and doesn’t stop. Somehow, and he has no idea how, but _somehow_ he knows he’s close. So, so, so, so, so close. The storm inside of him is suddenly quiet, like a banked flame, almost, as though it knows too, and his chest is heaving as he weaves through crowds of people, breath heavy with anticipation. He still doesn’t know where he’s going, but he can _taste_ it.

The pull in his gut doesn’t serve him nearly so well here as it had before, in the wild place he had come from; he hits dead ends and blocks in his path, complications that slow him down and make his skin feel tight with anxiety. Still, he makes progress, he keeps walking. He has to stop and double back sometimes in order to make headway, but he does it, and he goes, he goes, he goes.

He crosses a bridge; the water below it is dark, but not so dark as to frighten him. He’s not sure why he would be frightened, anyway. The bridge is very long, and by the time he reaches the end of it he feels like his stomach is being ripped right out of him, practically. He’s _close_.

The pull leads him down one street, then another and another, until he reaches a brick building that makes his heart pound. Three stories, maybe four? He can’t quite tell; he doesn’t think it matters, really. How many stories isn’t the point. The point is that he slips inside behind a man carrying a big paper sack, who grunts something at him that might be a greeting, and then he’s up and up and up the stairs, three flights, until he reaches a door.

It’s black. Sleek. If he’s honest, it looks a bit forbidding. Somewhere, something is telling him he doesn’t want to knock on it. In his stomach, that all-too-familiar pull is telling him that if he doesn’t knock on it _right now_ , he might vomit.

This is it. He doesn’t know what ‘it’ is, but this is it.

He reaches out with a certainty he doesn’t understand and knocks on the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was this whole fic just an excuse to give Matt/show!Alec blue eyes? It's a mystery. Who can say?


	3. Wild Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The door swings open, and there’s a man behind it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the third and final chapter! Hopefully it's as satisfying to read as it was to write. 
> 
> A couple things:  
> 1) I made a mix for this fic, which can be found [here](https://8tracks.com/akaparalian/stand-and-deliver). It's mostly unsettling faerie realm mood music.  
> 2) As always, you can find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/akaparalian) and [Tumblr,](http://floralegia.tumblr.com) but I now also have a [Ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/akaparalian) if you're so inclined! No pressure, of course, but if you do feel the urge, I'll gladly exchange cups of coffee for drabbles/prompt fills. Just message me!
> 
> Enjoy! <3

The door swings open, and there’s a man behind it.

He looks irritated, at first, and then abruptly shocked, as though he’s seen a ghost. He’s — now hardly seems the time to make such observations, but it’s really the only way to describe him — he’s _beautiful_ , even though he looks like perhaps he’s been ill. His face is a bit gaunt, and there are dark, heavy circles under his eyes, a sharp counterpoint to the glitter dusted above them. His hair is wild, and his eyes — at first they’re brown, and then in his surprise the color drops away to be replaced with brilliant gold, with slit pupils like a cat’s.

_“Alexander_?” the man chokes. There are tears in his eyes, and his hands are clenched tightly into fists. 

The word hits him like a blow and pricks at his skin like a bed of thorns. He can feel something tugging, tugging — not the same pull in his stomach that’s been leading him here all along, for all these days, but something entirely different, pulling at the fabric of his _mind_. The storm under his skin roils and rages and threatens to break, and he can’t let that happen — no matter what, he can’t let it hurt the man in the doorway, he can’t let any harm come to him at all, because to do so would be the greatest betrayal he could possibly imagine. 

“Magnus,” he says, without meaning to, without even realizing he had opened his mouth to speak, without knowing what that word even _means_. But the man in the doorway chokes on a sob and rushes forward to pull him into an embrace, and as soon as their skin brushes together, there’s one last tug in his mind, and everything rushes in all at once.

He gasps and staggers forward under the weight of the assault as a lifetime of memory and knowledge comes flooding back to him, but Magnus is there to catch him — actually, Magnus is clinging to him like a lifeline, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably, his head buried in the crook of Alec’s neck.

He remembers. _Alec_ remembers. He remembers going to the Seelie Queen, he remembers the water, he remembers _drowning_ , he —

Suddenly has context for the feeling under his skin, the storm, and he feels his heart nearly stop beating when he realizes what… what that could mean.

But there something — some _one_ — more important, and he brings shaky hands up to clutch at Magnus’ back, his shoulders, his head, because suddenly he has context for the way Magnus reacted to seeing him, too. 

“Oh, god,” he mumbles, the words nearly lost to Magnus’ hair as he buries his nose in it and breathes in deep, calming breaths, trying to slow his own heartbeat long enough to have a coherent train of thought. “Magnus, I — how long was I gone?”

Magnus doesn’t answer for a long minute, still muffling his sobs into Alec’s neck and shoulder, and when he does speak, his voice is so broken open that Alec’s heart stops.

“Six months,” he says.

Alec shuts his eyes. Six. Six _months_ of him wandering the faerie realm, with no idea who or where or what he was — _six months_ of Magnus not knowing if he was alive or dead, Magnus falling asleep alone, Magnus being hurt like this, and not only should Alec have been there to _help_ him, but he was the only reason that Magnus had been feeling that way at all.

He tries to remind himself that six months is nothing when it’s held up against forever, but that argument is feeling a little hollow at the moment.

And before he can even say anything — offer some kind of comfort or reassurance, _something_ — Magnus takes a deep, shuddering breath, and says, “And you — Jace said the rune, it… it was gone. And then it was back, and we didn’t know…”

Oh, God, of course. When he’d drowned, the Parabatai rune would have faded; when he’d woken up on the shoreline, presumably it would have come back. Alec, unfortunately, knows _exactly_ what that feels like, and he feels his heart lurch with pain for Jace, for what he must have been dealing with all this time.

But Jace isn’t here at the moment — Alec will need to see him soon, _wants_ to see him soon, but Magnus is still clinging to him like if he lets go again Alec will just go up in smoke, and hearing the way he still can’t get his breathing under control makes Alec feel like he’s going to split in two. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, pulling slightly at Magnus’ hair until he can press their foreheads together, until they’re standing there, still out in the open on the doorstep, and he can look down into Magnus’ eyes and say, “Magnus, _I’m so sorry_.”

Magnus shuts his eyes briefly and takes a deep breath in. When he opens them again, he briefly removes one hand from where it’s curled against Alec’s chest to wipe furiously at the remaining tears still threatening to roll down his face. “Where _were_ you?” he asks, voice thick. “Alexander, I — I was so terrified. For six months, I’ve been terrified, and I’ve had no idea where you are, and I couldn’t track you, and — and what happened to your _eyes_?”

His eyes? Alec has his mouth open to answer Magnus’ other questions — to explain about the Fountain, about everything he couldn’t tell Magnus before he left, for fear of being followed — but he has no idea, at first, what Magnus means about his eyes. Everything is still knitting together, his old memories interweaving and filling in the gaps in the new ones from the past six months, and it takes an embarrassingly long time, just standing there with his mouth hanging open, before he realizes what Magnus means.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, as he remembers looking down into a clear faerie stream and not understanding why he was confused to see bright blue eyes staring back at him. “Oh, um — I guess it’s a side effect?”

“Side effect,” Magnus breathes, not really a question, and Alec jumps despite himself at the all-too-familiar feeling of Magnus’ magic reaching out for him, spreading over his body and seeping _through_ him like an x-ray, and before he can say anything or even _think_ to say anything the storm is rising up from inside of him to meet it, and Magnus cries out.

Alec wrenches away from him, terrified, pure horror consuming him at the mere idea of his storm, his — _his_ magic, because there’s no denying it now, that’s what it _is_ , Seelie magic that the fucking Fountain gave him, and he’s standing there wretched, convinced that it’s hurt Magnus, that _he’s_ hurt Magnus. Any more than he already has, that is.

But Magnus doesn’t look hurt — he just looks shocked, and after a moment where they both just stand there, staring at each other with wide, terrified eyes, he reaches out for Alec with only the slightest bit of hesitation. Alec hesitates, fear sweeping through him all over again, but slowly, carefully, he reaches out for Magnus, feels his magic leap and swirl and crash through him, breaking against Magnus’ skin, but not hurting him. Alec lets out a shuddering breath.

“Alexander,” Magnus says, and there’s fear in his voice, but just a lingering tremor of it, and it’s leaking out in favor of wonder. “You…”

Alec takes a deep breath.

“I went to the Seelie Queen to ask her permission to seek the Fountain of Youth,” he says, and watches as Magnus goes stock-still, his grip on Alec’s hand tightening. “She agreed, in the interest of — well, of creating a faerie-touched Shadowhunter who leads an Institute, and having a, a little bit of extra influence over me, over _us_ , and so I was able to… I…” He trails off, gesturing aimlessly with the hand that Magnus isn’t holding, trying to encompass everything that has irrevocably changed about his own body, his own _existence,_ in the past six months. 

Magnus is blinking furiously, on the edge of tears again, and it looks like he’s having serious trouble breathing. Alec takes a step toward him, until they’re fully in each other’s space again, and tips his chin up, concerned. 

“Are… are you okay?” he asks, uncertain, feeling so raw and vulnerable even now, with electricity crackling in the air around him and the smell of ozone clouding his lungs as his magic reaches out desperately.

All he gets in response is a confused expression and some more rapid blinking, but then Magnus says, “Did it work?”

His voice is so small that it’s clear he’s terrified to even ask, and Alec bites his lip. He thinks about drowning, about waking up on the shore, covered in the strange, oily water of the Fountain. He thinks about that terrifying little girl — the Seelie Queen, he realizes suddenly, one more piece of the puzzle clicking into place — who had spoken to him just before he passed out of the faerie realm, of the strange tone of her voice when she’d said, _I hope you enjoy your eternity_.

“Yeah,” he breathes, and looks down into Magnus’ eyes and watches as the words break him apart. “Yeah. It worked.”

“So you…” He’s barely hanging on, but Alec’s no better. Their voices are both wobbly and wrecked, and this time Alec’s the one who feels hot tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.

“Forever,” he says simply. “Forever, Magnus. If… if you’ll have me.”

It hangs between them, unanswered, and Alec watches the slow progression of emotions across Magnus’ face like he’s reading an open book: shock, fear, awe, hope, terror, love. And then, between one breath and the next, Magnus lunges forward, closing the scant gap between them and leaning up to kiss him.

It’s not that great of a kiss, really — they’re both crying into it, raw emotions pouring out and through them, and Alec hasn’t had anything resembling a proper shower in six months, and they’re _still_ just standing in the doorway. But Alec shuts his eyes and leans into it and realizes that these past six months really _have_ been worth it, if it means he gets to keep this forever. 

And he’s willing to bet Magnus would agree.

—

They do make it inside, eventually, and everything between them feels like it’s sparking and crackling, like a livewire. Magnus clearly still has _so_ many questions, and honestly, Alec does too, and he should really contact the Institute, contact his _family_ , but — 

“Can — can I draw you a bath?” Magnus asks quietly, as soon as the door clicks shut behind them, and Alec can’t really do anything but agree.

The bathroom is exactly like he remembers it — never a given, with Magnus’ natural tendency to shake things up every few weeks or so — and by the time he walks in, having left the scraps of fae clothing that he’s lived in for the past half a year in a pile in the closet, no doubt to eventually be burned, and slipped into one of Magnus’ many silk robes instead, Magnus is sitting on the edge of the enormous black marble tub, reaching down to test the temperature of the water with his fingertips.

Alec studies him in silence for a moment. He’s still fully dressed, and he’d asked if he could draw _Alec_ a bath, not if he could draw _them_ a bath. But there’s no way in hell that Alec wants to be alone right now.

“Will you join me?” he asks quietly, and Magnus looks up and studies him for a long moment before he nods.

He thinks maybe he should be frightened of the water somehow, that it should make him feel panicky, maybe, but, as he slowly slides in and leans backward to press his back into Magnus’ chest, bracketed in by him on all sides, he really isn’t afraid at all. The familiar notes of sandalwood in the air — seriously, Magnus takes the idea of a signature scent _so_ far — are so different from the cloying smell of violets, and the gentle, light color of the water, slightly cloudy with bubbles and oils but still mostly see-through, is so far removed from the harsh, dark, oily water of the Fountain that it’s not hard at all for Alec to relax. This is comforting, familiar; he and Magnus have taken baths just like this one a hundred times.

And, as he lets one hand drift lazily to the surface of the water, his fingers float. Nothing is pulling him down here.

They’re silent at first, both just slowly readjusting to the sensation of skin-on-skin, the warmth of each other and of the water. There’s also the entirely new sensation of their magic — _both_ of their magic — brushing up against each other’s skin; Alec’s still terrified of the idea of his new, unknown, largely untested power somehow hurting Magnus, of _him_ hurting Magnus and not meaning to and not knowing how to stop it, but somehow the longer they lie here together, the more he realizes that that won’t happen. His magic knows Magnus just as much as he does; it’s a part of him, after all. It still flares up whenever Magnus shifts and their skin brushes together, but after the fifth or sixth time that happens, Alec realizes it’s not a threat — it’s more of a greeting. His magic saying hello every time Magnus touches him, reaffirming that he’s there, that they’re together.

“What was it like?” Magnus says quietly, after a while, when the water is just starting to cool.

Alec hums, not sure exactly how to answer that. Part of him wants to admit that it was terrible — because, in so many ways, it was. He was alone and in distress for so much of it, confused, unsure. He had had no idea who he was or where he was going, just that he had to get there.

But he _had_ known he had to get there. And now he remembers why.

“You were my — tether, I guess, is what the Seelie Queen called it,” he responds softly, leaning back so that his head rests in the crook of Magnus’ shoulder. “After I… went under, when I came back, I couldn’t remember anything. I mean literally anything, not who I was, or where I was, or why… But I knew there was somewhere I had to be.” He touches his abdomen, where he’d felt that tug for so long. “I could feel it, here. Like a lifeline. It was all that kept me walking.”

It doesn’t really answer Magnus’ question, but Alec can feel the way his throat bobs and hear his breathing stutter.

“Alexander,” he says thickly, and suddenly Alec _has_ to turn around, has to be face-to-face.

He sends water sloshing up over the sides of the tub, but he doesn’t care. Neither of them cares. Alec clutches Magnus’ face in his hands and rests their foreheads together, like he’d done outside on the doorstep, and this time Magnus isn’t crying, though it looks like he’s only holding on by the tips of his fingers. 

“I came back to you,” Alec whispers, becuase he has to, because he needs Magnus to understand. “I died down there, Magnus, and the only reason I was able to come back was because of you. Because even when I didn’t know anything, I knew you were waiting for me.”

“ _Alexander_ ,” Magnus says again, sounding more and more like he’s teetering on the edge of tears, and Alec surges forward to kiss him.

Their mouths join and part and join again, and Alec relishes the familiar slide of Magnus’ tongue pressing forward into his mouth, and it feels feverish and steady all at once. They can’t get enough of each other — they’ve been apart for so long, and Magnus hadn’t even known for sure if he was alive or dead, and Alec hadn’t been able to _remember_ — but they know, now, that they have time. Have _forever_. There’s no need to rush.

Still, it doesn’t exactly take long for things to get heated. Magnus moans into his mouth and Alec is suddenly achingly aware of every inch of warm, slick skin underneath him, more and more water crashing out onto the floor as they move together. It’s nothing artful, but Alec thinks that nothing else has ever felt so good as Magnus under his hands at this exact moment, warm and familiar and _his,_ forever. Not just for the rest of his human lifetime, but _forever_.

He leans away to hide his face in the hollow of Magnus’ throat, because he feels positively dizzy, his mind spinning and his pulse pounding in his ears, every nerve ending alight. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to process Magnus’ sudden gasp and the way he freezes, then slowly relaxes, cradling Alec so, so gently in his arms. 

When Alec manages to sit up and look, though, his reaction is obvious.

There are clouds all over the floor — fluffy white clouds, hovering a few inches off the ground and sneaking up over the sides of the tub and across the surface of the water until they can almost be mistaken for an especially frothy bubble bath. He’s not sure if they’re made of all that water that he and Magnus just got all over the floor, or if they’re wholesale conjured up out of nothing, but either way, Alec can’t do anything but sit there and stare at them in shock. 

“Fae magic is often much more… elemental, I suppose, than warlock magic,” Magnus says after they’ve both sat there frozen for an embarrassingly long time. He sounds breathless, and somehow Alec doesn’t think it’s entirely because of what they were doing a few minutes ago, or even what they were gearing up to do.

“It feels like — like a storm, most of the time,” Alec says quietly. “Uh — weather magic? Is that a thing?”

“It’s definitely a thing.” Magnus leans forward to kiss him again, but it’s much gentler now. “I suppose you have a lot to learn about magical theory.”

“Mmm,” Alec agrees, unable to tear his eyes away from the fluffy little clouds. They look perfectly content, somehow, just floating through the bathroom — some of them are up high enough now that he thinks they’d be at eye-level if he were standing, revealing that the floor is much drier than it used to be, so yes, it appears he has just created a little model of the water cycle in the middle of the bathroom. Then, finally, he glances over at Magnus, who’s watching him just as intently as he’d just been looking at the clouds, and feels a slow, warm smile melt over his face. “Good thing I know a guy who I think will make a pretty good tutor.”

“Does that mean I’m going to be able to get you in a schoolboy uniform?” Magnus asks very seriously, eyes sparkling, and it’s so — so _normal_ , so them, that some last remaining ball of tension that’s been riding in Alec’s throat finally relaxes. “The hot teacher fantasy goes both ways, you know.”

“Maybe if you play your cards right.”

“Then I suppose it’s a good thing that being a warlock makes it _very_ easy to cheat at cards.”

Alec laughs softly, and watches as some of the clouds slowly start to fade and drift away, the water slipping back down onto the floor.

They lapse into silence after that; in the time Alec’s been here — maybe an hour? He at least has a better sense of time passing here than he had in the Seelie realm, but he’s not exactly wearing a watch and has no idea where his phone is, so it’s hard to be precise — he has felt a very gradual, soothing sensation which he now recognizes, after it has progressed in the background for quite some time, as settling into his own skin. Magnus is near him, touching him gently, warm and vivid and _here_ , and everything around him is familiar and instinctually recognized as safe. He takes a deep breath into the silence and lets it out very slowly, then he looks away from the clouds, back to Magnus, and smiles.

“Can we go to bed now?” he asks softly, and even before the words are fully out of his mouth the tub is starting to drain and Magnus is on his feet, offering him a hand to help him step down onto the slippery tile floor.

“Do you mind if I clear away your demonstration to avoid having either one of us break our necks?” Magnus says, a little dryly, and Alec snorts before nodding and waving his hand dismissively.

“‘Course not. I’d do it myself if I knew how.” He watches, with a rapt attention that’s both familiar and entirely new, alien, as Magnus flicks his wrist neatly and sends the remaining clouds, as well as the puddles of water they’d risen from, away instantaneously.

“You have plenty of time to learn,” he says, and Alec catches his mouth curving up into an affectionate smirk. “Like I said: hot teacher fantasy.”

Alec smiles, and leans over to kiss the corner of his mouth softly, and then proceeds to the bedroom with the single-minded determination of one who hasn’t slept in anything resembling a proper bed — indeed, hasn’t really slept at all, unless you count having briefly died after drowning in a very large and violent body of magical water and presumably having been unconscious for some time thereafter — in six fucking months.

—

There is a pounding on the door that, somehow, he would recognize anywhere.

Alec jolts awake. He has no idea what time it is, other than that it’s late; it had been early evening when he got here, and they’d retired to bed far earlier than normal, just laying there for a while and talking and feeling the quiet relief of being tangled together in their bed after so long and after so much uncertainty. Alec knows, dimly, that he must have dropped off to sleep at some point, probably hilariously early; in his defense, he’s had a _long_ six months, and the fae realms as weird as shit and he hasn’t slept in literally _half a year_ and he’s earned it.

The pounding on the door doesn’t stop, and now he can hear a voice, muffled through the door but clearly screaming.

“Magnus! _Magnus!_ Open up!”

Jace. It’s Jace. But he knew that already; he recognized the knock, after all, and even if he didn’t, the parabatai bond is _singing_ with proximity after so long apart.

Magnus comes too much more slowly than Alec had as he’s in the process of scrabbling to free himself from the covers, uncoordinated after having been yanked from sleep in the middle of the night when his body is still screaming for rest.

“J’ce,” Magnus mutters, and Alec nods, though he has no idea if Magnus can see it in the dark, or even if he’s looking.

“I’m going to —” he starts, but Magnus cuts him off, sounding marginally more awake with every passing moment.

“Go, go. I’ll be along.”

Finally free of the covers, Alec all but sprints for the front door.

“Magnus, open up, it’s Alec!” comes through the wood even as he rushes toward it, and that, that’s Izzy — and when he pulls the door open wide, sure enough, there are Izzy and Jace and Clary too, all three of them geared up and a bit the worse for wear; they must have just come from patrol, or from a mission. 

As soon as Alec gets the door open, he freezes, and the three of them freeze too. Izzy has gone deathly pale, and Jace’s eyes are wide as saucers. Clary, of all people, is the one who seems to be grasping the situation the fastest; she gasps softly into the sudden silence, and her eyes are glimmering just slightly.

“ _Jace_ ,” Alec chokes out finally, _“Izzy,_ ” and that breaks whatever spell had been holding everyone frozen in place. They all crash together like water, Isabelle and Jace reaching for him to pull him into an embrace at the exact same moment. Clary hangs back, but there are tears fully running down her face now, her mouth hanging open somewhere between a smile and a sob.

No one manages any words for a little while after that, all of them just breathing each other in, shaking and crying and holding. Alec’s magic is surging under his skin again, but, as he’d come to recognize with Magnus, earlier, it’s not violent; it’s washing out of him and over Izzy and Jace, even across the scant gap between the Lightwood sibling tangle to where Clary stands to touch her, too, a greeting and an apology and an affirmation of his love. 

He only really notices exactly _how_ much it’s washing over them when he feels sunshine on his cheeks, and opens his eyes — when had he shut them? — and pulls back slightly from where his head had been bent over Isabelle’s to see that the four of them are suffused in a warm golden light that feels like joy and relief.

Isabelle notices it, too, maybe because he moves; she gasps and pulls back slightly. “Alec?” she asks uncertainly, staring around them as though trying to determine if there’s some source for the light that she’s not seeing, if Magnus has come out of the bedroom, perhaps, and decided to show his affection in an odd way.

But it’s not Magnus, it’s Alec, and it’s not oddness so much as instinct; the light starts to fade as his thoughts come back into some sort of order, something beyond the pure, wordless rush of emotion that had taken him over at the sight of them.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, and somehow feels his mouth curve up in a small smile. “Um, a lot has happened.”

“Your eyes are blue,” Clary notes, still hanging back just a little, though she’s taken a step closer now that Jace and Alec and Izzy are starting to slowly disentangle, their hug shifting into just standing near enough to each other that they can each ascertain that the other two are here and breathing.

“You were _dead_ ,” Jace says, sounding utterly wrecked, and, to be fair, that’s a much more important accusation. Alec winces.

“I was,” he admits. “But — not anymore. Obviously. And, well…” _Not ever, anymore?_ That’s not quite true — he can still be _killed_ , after all — and that’s not exactly how he wants to tell them. “Uh. You guys should probably come inside.”

“Yes, this conversation has happened in the doorway once today already,” comes a sleep-rumpled voice from behind them; Alec turns slightly to see that Magnus has finally made his appearance, and has no hope of stymieing the smile that overtakes him at the sight of his beautiful, powerful boyfriend blinking sleep from his eyes and squinting slightly at them, as though he’s not quite awake enough to see properly yet.

“How long has he _been_ here?” Jace asks indignantly, even as they all move towards the living room, Clary shutting the door behind them. “Why the hell didn’t you call us?”

“He hadn’t slept in six months,” Magnus says. “He needed a nap.”

“You still should have _called us_.”

“Jace,” Alec says a bit tiredly. “I know, you’re right, but we had — some things to discuss.”

That seems to distract Jace well enough, as well as the rest of them. Magnus is smiling slightly at him, unbearably fond even when half-awake after having his home suddenly invaded in the dead of night by three Shadowhunters who are probably getting ichor on his couch cushions, and the other three have various expressions of curiosity and concern.

“What kind of things?” Izzy asks slowly, as though afraid of the answer. “Alec, what _happened?_ Where did you _go?_ ”

He takes a deep breath and starts at the beginning.

—

There are tears. There are statements of flat disbelief. There is quiet shock and uncertainty. Then, almost an hour later, there are five mugs of chamomile tea clutched in five sets of hands, and for the first time since Alec opened the door to let him in, Jace doesn’t look like he’s on the brink of tears.

“It’s gonna take me some time,” he admits quietly, and Alec nods, shrugs; that’s entirely fair, and honestly the least of what he’d expected.

“It’s going to take me some time, too,” he says honestly. “But I…” 

He looks across the room at Magnus, who’s in quiet conversation with Clary and Isabelle on the other side of the room. The three of them are discussing the magical aspect of Alec’s new existence, it seems, giving him and Jace some space to themselves.

“I don’t regret it,” Alec concludes softly. He finds himself unable to quite meet Jace’s eyes, but it’s impossible to miss the way he nods, slowly.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

It’s not really acceptance, or forgiveness — not that Alec thinks he really _needs_ Jace’s forgiveness, for any of this, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t _want_ it, somehow; he’s well aware of what this means for them, for _their_ bond, and even sitting right next to him hale and healthy he thinks maybe he can already feel the shadow of what it will be like to lose him and then live with that loss for the rest of time — but it’s something. It’s a start. Like all of this, it’s a new start.

“I love you,” Alec says suddenly, so suddenly that Jace starts a little. “You know that, right? This wasn’t about — it wasn’t about getting away from you guys, somehow. Or from anything — from the Clave, or being a Shadowhunter, or whatever. It wasn’t about _getting away_. Okay?”

Jace looks almost surprised. “Of course,” he says, “of course I know that, Alec, are you nuts? Do you think I wouldn’t —” 

He cuts himself off, but he’s staring across the room at Clary like he can’t help himself, so Alec gets what he means, he really does. He nods, slowly, and Jace turns back to him, a little smirk ghosting at his lips. 

“So you made yourself immortal for him,” he says, his tone suddenly miles lighter. “When are you gonna put a ring on it?”

Somehow — maybe it’s just that it’s so late, but that feels like a pale excuse of a reason even inside his own head — that, after everything, shocks him. Alec splutters, fully aware he’s gone beet red, and feels little crackles of static electricity shocking off of him. With his luck, his hair’s probably gone all poofy and weird, like he rubbed it on a balloon; based on the way Jace bursts out laughing, in fact, this is almost certainly true, or at least there’s something similarly ridiculous happening to his person.

But his parabatai’s laughter, even at his own expense, is soothing, somehow, and while he grumbles good-naturedly (and pointedly refuses to answer Jace’s question, of course), he can’t keep himself from grinning. The sudden outburst noise as Jace cracks up seems to have gotten Magnus’ attention from across the room, so Alec shoots a fond smile at him and rolls his eyes a little, which hopefully conveys a _You don’t even wanna know_ that will prevent him from actually having to explain the source of Jace’s amusement until he’s good and ready. Until, for example, he has a ring.

For now, though, he has the four of them, and while he’s painfully aware, even now, even more than he ever has been before, that it’s not permanent — that he has them _now_ , but not forever, at least not all of them — in this moment, it’s enough. It’s more than enough.

It’s _home._


End file.
